December 25, 2005
The Passenger
Patriarchy in the Driver's Seat
I suppose I felt cool driving around at 1:30am Christmas morning to Nation of Ulysses' 13-Point Program to Destroy America blaring on the car stereo. But I slowed down every time I saw a police car (at least 4 of these) and the glaring lights on every other house drove home the fact that I was speeding around in an American suburb. I was driving, I know where I was coming from, but I didn't feel like I was going anywhere.
There is a lot I need to think about, but I'm finding a million differnt ways to keep it off my mind.
Here's one. Saw Michaelangelo Antonoini's The Passenger the other night, made in 1975, now rereleased and at the Crest for a while at $3 US. You know its an Antoinini film when your partner is fast asleep five minutes into the film, and a sizable troupe of teenage girls walks out of the theater after another five
Honestly, teenage girls have a lot better things to do then watch the The Passenger, but I'll get to that.
The film has Jack Nicholson playing a British journalist, David Locke, raised in the States, who finds himself in Africa covering a guerilla war. He wanders back to his hotel after getting his jeep stuck in the desert to find the other Englishman at the hotel is dead. He decides to trade identities with the dead Englishman, faking his own death and returning to Europe free of his job, his wife, and an adopted child (who we never see). Turns out the dead Englishman was a gunrunner for the guerilla movement, and Locke lets events take him around Europe making meetings in the dead Englishman's date book. He hooks up with Maria Schneider, a young women backpacking through Europe, and they have some sort of romance while Locke can't decide how he kind of maybe perhaps possibly feels about his new identity.
The film is your typical intellectual chin-stroker: it has a dick firmly at its center. What I mean is, the "dilemma" Locke makes for himself is your typical male adventure story in the great patriarchal tradition of the Odyssey or Kerouac or Evasion, where everything a man ought to have responsibility for is thrown to the wind for the sake of an ego (I don't think its a coincidence that Locke was raised in America). Antonini has the good sense to slow everything down, so he gives you a lot of time to think about everything Locke is not thinking about: namely, what he's doing with his life and why he's doing it, questions that he never asks of himself the whole film through. In one of the many flashback scenes, an African witch doctor Locke is trying to interview explains to him that, perhaps the questions Locke is asking of others says more about himself than anything else. Maybe that's Antoinini's point: Locke (and by extension the West) is so busy reporting on others that He never explores Himself and who He is. Maybe that's why the European title of the film is Professione: reporter.
Note the male pronoun. The consequnces of this for Locke are stark enough by the time the film arrives at its artful final sequence, but the consequences for the rest of the world - for society - remain as undeveloped as Schneider's character, credited in the film as simply "The Girl." To me, this is evidence enough that to Antonoini, who can't seem to think beyond his own penis, that's all the character really is, the female auxilary to the Dilemma of Western Civilization. A glowing review of the film on Internet Movie Database admits the character is unwritten, but finds her to be "well-played by petite, dusky, sensual Maria Schneider" - that's all the reviewer can muster, basically saying she looks great in a loose-fitting blouse in the Spanish sunlight, because that's about all Antoinini lets her do. What a prick.
Which brings me back to why I figure teenage girls have better things to do than sit through a screening of The Passenger. I could lament how they missed such a brilliant musing example of Film-As-Art; I could lament the fact that such a film, which strikes deep at the dilemma of Man in Modern Times, is not rivaling, say, King Kong at the multiplex. I could, but I won't, because it would be stupid to do so. Not everybody has time to muse over Antoinini (notice i don't even bother to spell the man's name right), and it probably says a lot about me that I do find the time. But its not just a matter of time, because the film appeals to me, it speaks to me. If I didn't know any better, I'd be the heir to Locke. I'd read both the Odyssey and On the Road by the time I was fifteen. I didn't want to like Evasion but I was up to my knees in a dumpster full of trash within weeks of finishing it. And like most of my favorite films, The Passenger is slow, aesthetically pleasing, and terribly overpopulated with overwritten dude characters and underwritten (and/or non-existent) female characters (Thin Red Line *cough* Weekend *cough* or nearly any given Scorsese film). Which is why I am well overdue for another viewing of Born in Flames.
For all of Antoinini's dudeness, i will say The Passenger does come across as more of a critique of aloofness than a celebration. But its a critique that doesn't offer any solutions; for a critique of being alone, its rather circular, because it is solely critique. And if I'm going to take that critique of critique to heart, I've got to realize its 3:00am on Christmas morning - which is why I'm writing like this - and I ought to really consider if this is what I should preoccupied with
